


Saudade

by schweet_heart



Series: The Prince's Book of Hours [4]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Drabble, M/M, Reincarnation, modern!AU, remix eligible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2014-09-21
Packaged: 2018-02-18 04:44:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2335787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweet_heart/pseuds/schweet_heart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>saudade</i> (portuguese): the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love which is lost. Based on <a href="http://labeteglatissante.tumblr.com/post/82874780974/colinmorgasms-fucking-merthur-shiit-i-want-a">this</a> tumblr post.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saudade

 

He sees the poster only in passing, the first time. He’s late, racing down the tube steps before the train can leave, and on the wall there’s this image, a man and a woman together under an umbrella, the caption sending a shiver of unexpected electricity down his spine. He doesn’t remember having seen it before, doesn’t remember having experienced the odd frisson of half-imagined… _something_  that flashes through his mind at the sight of it. He pauses mid-stride, takes another look — down on the platform the doors are closing, but still he reads it through again.

_What if seeing each other again changed everything?_

Does anyone’s life actually work like that? He wonders. Love at second sight, fairytale romance, the whole bit? He’d like to think that it’s possible, if only because sometimes the sheer mundanity of the everyday world threatens to become oppressive, but it seems unlikely — especially here, in the middle of the station, surrounded by busy city-dwellers going about their ordinary, predictable routines. Everything about the Underground reminds him that he’s just another normal bloke: he’s got his studies, his job, he’s…missing his train. Bloody buggering fuck.

Merlin runs down the remaining steps and after the 8:45, and promptly relegates the poster to the back of his mind for the rest of the day.

 

+

 

Arthur walks past the poster every day for a week and thinks nothing of it, until Gwen calls him up out of the blue to tell him she and Lance are getting married.

 _What if seeing each other again changed everything?_  

If you asked Arthur, he’d say second chances are overrated.

 

+

 

The next time Merlin sees it, he has some time to kill so he turns it into a game of sorts. Who would he like a second chance with more? He thinks about Will first, then about Freya; imagines running into either or both of them in a crowded tube station. Well, Freya’s dead, so that would be a surprise, though a welcome one — unless she ended up being a zombie or a vampire, in which case, no. But he and Will still spoke, really, they called each other up every now and then and they still visited when he was home over Christmas. They were still friends. So, you know, it wouldn’t exactly count as a life-altering event if they ran into each other on the train in London, and if it was a second chance they wanted, they could have had it any time over the past five years. They had both been pretty clear on the fact that it was over and they were better off that way.

It’s at this point that Merlin comes to the depressing conclusion that he doesn’t really  _have_ any kind of long-lost love affair to rekindle, which, while disappointing, does not act as much of a deterrent. On the contrary, for some reason he can’t quite explain he finds himself lingering over the poster every time he sees it, playing out what-if scenarios in his head, trying to rid himself of the persistent sense of loss which overtakes him whenever it catches his eye. His thesis advisor, Gaius, suggests that it’s not so much loss as longing, and he should probably try to get out more, but Merlin knows better. It’s not that he wants to find some tragic love story to look back on and regret. It’s that he feels like he already  _has_ , and he  _is_ , even though he can’t understand why.

 

+

 

Arthur ends up waiting for his train beneath the same poster at the same time for three days in a row, and he’s starting to think someone out there is messing with him.

Yes, he’s trying to be supportive about Gwen’s upcoming wedding. Yes, he regrets the way their relationship ended, even though, yes, he’s also pretty certain about the fact that he’s gay, so he doesn’t really see why it should matter. The two of them had been good together, for a while: not the sex, obviously, but the partnership, sharing the give and take of their lives like an old married couple. It almost hadn’t mattered that, also like an old, married couple, they had seldom actually felt the need to express their feelings by way of physical affection. Until suddenly it had.

Rationally, Arthur knows it wasn’t Gwen’s fault. They were young, it was college, and she’d realised she was in love with his best friend right around the same time that Arthur had discovered the exact same thing — it was the kind of unavoidable clusterfuck that came part and parcel of growing up, generally speaking. And yet, for all that, he still counts Gwen as the great lost love of his life, which only makes the whole wedding issue that much more difficult to think about. So naturally it’s the only thing he can’t  _stop_ thinking about, every time he sees one of those damned posters on the tube.

 

+

 

“I don’t see what’s so compelling about it,” Gwaine says, when Merlin shows him the poster and asks for his opinion. “It’s kind of rubbish, really.  _First love, second chances_  — who even believes in that kind of bullshit anymore?”

“I know,” Merlin says, because he can’t admit that he sort of maybe does, just a little. Gwaine is a good friend, but he’s also the kind of friend that would never let Merlin live that sort of confession down for as long as he lived. “So it’s kind of ridiculous, I get that. What I don’t get is why it makes me so sad.”

Gwaine studies the image for a while longer, then says, “Maybe its because she’s wearing a wedding ring, and they’re obviously having an affair behind some poor bloke’s back.”

Merlin hits him. “Gwaine!”

“I’m just saying, Merlin. True love, destiny, — that kind of thing doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. It’s all schlock spun by advertising companies to get you to buy their worthless products. Don’t they teach you about that at your fancy university? You’re better off without it, mate.”

Which, Merlin thinks, is kind of the problem, because he’s starting to suspect that maybe he isn’t.

 

+

 

Arthur gets his official wedding invitation on a Tuesday. It’s cloudy, and the only real signs of the oncoming spring are the slight rise in temperature and an increase in the amount of rainfall. He stares at the gold-embossed stationery for a moment, taking in the words  _cordially invited_  and  _plus one_  and considers dropping it in the gutter and pretending he never saw it. He puts it in his pocket instead, because Morgana would kill him if she found out he’d ‘lost’ the invitation to her favourite ex’s nuptials, and when he ends up standing underneath that goddamn poster yet  _again_  while he’s waiting for the train, he decides to take it as a sign. 

He pulls out his phone and pens Gwen a quick email, saying thank you for the invitation he’d be delighted to come, and sends it before he can change his mind. It’s not as if he thinks anything will come of it, not really. But a guy can dream.

 

+

 

Merlin is  _not_  drifting, no matter what his mother says. He’s two and a half years into his doctorate and he loves his work, and he is one hundred percent certain that this is what he wants to do with his life. He enjoys reading old manuscripts, translating the writing of long-dead poets into comprehensible verse; he loves the feeling of teasing out the meaning of a text like a spool of thread, letting the author’s thought-processes unfold before him, until a new sliver of history comes alive in his head. And if he finds his mind wandering, sometimes, to a few words in plain old Modern English on the side of a wall, well. He’s always been a procrastinator by nature; it’s just the way his mind works. It doesn’t mean anything.

 

+

 

In the end, the wedding is surprisingly beautiful.

A lot of people he knows are there, some of whom he hasn’t seen for years; Gwen’s dress is stunning and the ceremony goes off without a hitch. Arthur thought he’d feel sad, and all right, yes, he is a bit melancholy and he does have maybe a bit too much to drink. But it also feels good. Fitting, somehow, as if this is the way that things were always supposed to end up.

“I think I might actually be over Gwen,” he tells Morgana, in the slightly wondering tone of the more than a little drunk. “I’m serious. I think I’m actually over her.”

“Thank fucking God,” Morgana says, rolling her eyes. “Does this mean you’ll stop drunk-dialling me at two in the morning to complain about where it all went wrong?”

“That was one time!” Arthur says, scowling. “And anyway, that was Leon’s fault and you know it. He’s the one that said tequila would be a good idea.”

“Leave my boyfriend out of it,” Morgana says, but some of Arthur’s genuine bemusement must come through because she actually takes pity on him and pats him on the arm.

“Arthur,” she says. “Gwen was always too good for you, anyway; even if you weren’t gay it wasn’t going to work out.”

“Well, that makes me feel better.”

“No, listen. I know you think the two of you had some fantastic romance, but — you met in high school, for fuck’s sake, when you were desperately trying to pretend you didn’t want to blow your biology tutor and Gwen was too shocked you even asked her out to say no. It wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven.”

Arthur can only blink at her, feeling like a deer in the headlights, but she’s not finished yet.

“I think it’s a good thing you decided to come today,” she says, and she’s looking down her nose at him with a combination of superciliousness and what looks suspiciously like actual affection. “So you can realise that. There are other fish in the sea, Arthur. And some of them even have cocks.”

She gets called away, then, by another friend who spots her from across the room, and Arthur just stands there with his champagne in his hand, reeling from more than just the alcohol. It’s hard to believe this is his life: he’s skirting the edge of thirty, with a successful career and a healthy social life, and if it’s not Gwen that he’s been missing all these years then what is it? 

He’s still standing there some time later when Gwen herself comes up and asks him to dance.

“Are you sure?” Arthur blurts without thinking, and she smiles up at him, her curly hair faming her face in soft ringlets, dotted with white roses.

“Only if you want to,” she says. “I just wanted to say thank you for coming. It means a lot to me — and to Lance.”

Arthur glances across the dance floor to see his erstwhile best friend watching the two of them carefully, a wary look on his face. Catching Arthur’s eye, he lifts his champagne flute in a salute and gives a small smile, and Arthur feels the last of his uneasiness dissolve. Maybe they’re right, he thinks, as he steps onto the dance floor with Gwen, dark-eyed and radiant and entirely not his heart’s desire, in his arms. Maybe seeing each other again really can change everything.

 

+

 

The final time Merlin sees the poster, he’s late again, half stumbling down the stairs on his way to an appointment that he’s already overshot by, oh, roughly an hour. He’s not looking at the advertising on the walls, or even where he’s going, which is probably why he almost misses the man at first — the one standing in front of the poster staring at it as if it holds some clue to life, the universe and everything. He catches a gleam of blond hair in his peripheral vision, and then there’s a kind of visceral  _tug_ in his belly that he’s never felt before, and he stops so suddenly the person behind him runs into him, swears loudly, and shoves past with a glare that Merlin doesn’t even notice.

All else aside, he’s the sort of bloke Merlin is always going to look at twice — fit and tanned and more than a little gorgeous. He’s dressed in the sort of well-tailored suit that screams money, a gold watch on his wrist and a briefcase at his feet that probably cost more than Merlin makes in a year, and he  _should_ be just another stuck-up businessman except for the overwhelming certainty Merlin has that the two of them have met before.

Later, Merlin disclaims all responsibility for what happens next: the way the station lighting flickers and sparks and then goes out altogether, all except for the little spotlight right above where the man is standing. Later, of course, Arthur doesn’t believe a word of it, because after all he was  _right there_ when it happened, close enough to feel the thrill of electricity as it rushed past him and the world shifted on its axis, just a little bit, struggling to accommodate an overlap of past and future that was never meant to occur. 

At the time, however, Merlin can only say, “it’s you,” and “ _Arthur_ ,” and Arthur doesn’t say anything at all. He doesn’t need to.


End file.
